Tag Archives: Brewster Kahle

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) came to the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco on April 27. 300+ participants filed into the pews of the former Christian Science church at 300 Funston Avenue to learn about the progress since the project began in 2010 with a vision of creating “large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all. ” (DPLA wiki). Speakers at the “Church of Brewster” [Kahle] included librarians, technologists, publishers, archivists (notably David Ferriero, 10th Archivist of the United States–by phone), programmers, and open-government activists. Initially funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and operated out of Harvard’s Berkman Center, the DPLA has just become its own 501(c)(3) nonprofit so it can apply for additional funding. The target date for a public alpha release is April 2013.

A few snippets I noted…

“Physical browsing is three times more powerful for discovering new books than online browsing” — Praven Madan (Keplers’ 2020/Booksmith)

“Entire classes of books will never be produced as books again — even fiction.”–Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media)

“What is local and special in our communities is important. What will make DPLA successful is making that unique content accessible.”–Susan Hildreth (

“Libraries that can run a catalog can run a server that will provide an e-book storage and lending system”–Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive)

Of the many speakers, two stood out for their fervor (appropriately delivered from the dais of the old church), but in very different ways and on different topics — Dwight McInvaill of the Georgetown County Library (SC) and Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org. McInvaill described with great enthusiasm his library’s efforts to create a digital library that sounded very similar to our own project. Malamud, on the other hand, preached on the need for making government documents — in particular, public law — freely available and reversing the current situation of referenced materials in the Code of Federal Regulations often being available only at a steep price. Malamud received a big round of applause when he stepped down from the pulpit…er, lectern.

Lunch was also lively. With the draw of a beautiful day, many of the attendees took to the park strip across Funston. Joining my group were the Mavin of Metadata, Karen Coyle, and app developer Andrew Donoho, who got into a somewhat heated discussion over the value of Dublin Core — “DC is in everything” vs “DC is irrelevant.” More than a few sparks flew…

For now, we’ll be watching the DPLA to see where it goes and will look at how our project might contribute.

I made a pilgrimage of sorts to a scruffy industrial section of Richmond, CA this week as I delivered 265 books from the Wine Library to the Internet Archive‘s physical archive. A cold breeze blew through the tanker cars on the railroad sidings across the street from IA’s warehouse at the east end of Florida Street and rattled the warehouse security gate . I pressed the doorbell on the steel door. As the dolorous strains of a Christmas carol chimed within, Mark Graves, the facility manager, appeared to open the gate and welcomed me to IA. He brought over an empty pallet by forklift to the back of my pickup and we loaded my eleven boxes containing wine-related materials mostly dating from the mid-1800s through 1923. These out-of-copyright works will be scanned and become part of IA’s growing catalog of digitized materials. We will then add the links to the MARC bibliographic records in our Horizon catalog as well as derive records for display in CONTENTdm. Roughly half of the pre-1923 (the copyright cut-off date) materials in the collection have already been scanned by IA or Google; we will go through the same process with them.

Also included in the delivery were 26 oral history transcripts of interviews conducted by the Wine Library Associates. We will pair them up with the original audio (in in some cases video) recordings in CONTENTdm in a new Winemakers Oral History Collection.

Both these groups of materials are part of the grant-funded effort to digitize as much of the Wine Library’s materials as practical — including books, pamphlets, photographs, wine labels and more. Much of the Library’s holdings are still under copyright, of course, and likely won’t be available digitally, but our project will make a significant part of Sonoma County’s wine history available electronically.

Mark Graves was kind enough to give me tour of the facility. The headquarters are still in San Francisco, but IA acquired the Richmond building a year ago to replace the Oakland warehouse they were leasing to provide not only processing and server space, but also space to physically archive every book that they could get their hands on. As IA founder Brewster Kahle wrote in his blog last year, “Internet Archive is building a physical archive for the long term preservation of one copy of every book, record, and movie we are able to attract or acquire.” Many of these — particularly out of copyright, but also “orphan” works, for which the copyright owner is unknown — will be available through the Open Library program. The physical books donated to IA are cataloged, scanned, boxed and stored in shipping containers stacked two high in the warehouse. Sonoma County Library has recently joined Open Library and will be contributing some number of de-accessioned books.

Although there is room for a big crew at the Richmond facility, only three people were at work when I visited — Mark and two catalogers faced with an overwhelming number of books. He showed me the future offices and a partially assembled scanning machine, but said the process of moving operations and materials had been very slow. The actual scanning is done at various satellite scanning locations — our books would be taken to San Francisco.

Quixotic? Probably. Necessary? Yes. The recession hit IA as hard as many other nonprofits, but they are determined to continue their mission of archiving and making accessible the written and electronic record of our times. I’m glad that we are able to support them even in small ways through our project.